North Korea

“The Statement Is a Joke”: North Korea Experts Bemoan the Trump-Kim “Photo Op”

Trump got what he wanted, but Kim Jong Un got more. “The president continues to say that Kim is giving up his nuclear weapons. Kim continues to refuse to promise that,” says a nonproliferation expert. “I don’t know how long they can keep fudging this.”

Donald Trump struggled to contain a smile as he reached out to offer his hand to Kim Jong Un on Tuesday morning, evidently self-satisfied at making history as the first sitting president of the United States to meet with a leader of North Korea. The handshake itself lasted 13 seconds, with Trump briefly reaching up with his free hand to squeeze Kim’s bicep, in a gesture that could be read as a display of dominance or of solicitous familiarity. And yet, despite Trump’s obvious glee, the denouement of the improbable months-long courtship, which began with the two leaders exchanging threats of nuclear annihilation, amounted to little more than a propaganda win for Kim and a legacy-builder for Trump. “The photo op was the summit for our reality-TV president and for eager-to-be-accepted D.P.R.K.,” a former State Department official who previously worked in the region told me. “Any day of talks is better than a day of missile launches,” they conceded. But it seemed clear, as Trump boarded Air Force One that night to return to Washington, that the self-proclaimed deal-maker had given away more than he had won at the negotiating table.

Trump had sought to downplay expectations before the highly anticipated meeting in Singapore, even as he promoted the event like the Thrilla in Manila. “I think the minimum would be a relationship. We’d start at least a dialogue,” he said over the weekend, casting the summit—a mark of legitimacy that U.S. administrations had resisted giving North Korea for decades—as more of a get-to-know-you than an opportunity for substantive diplomacy. After the meeting with Kim, however, Trump appeared jubilant. “We’re ready to write a new chapter between our nations,” Trump said at a news conference after more than four hours of talks, in which he was joined by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a presumably fuming John Bolton. According to a joint statement, Kim had “reaffirmed” his commitment to a denuclearized Korean peninsula, and Trump committed that he would “provide security guarantees” to the D.P.R.K.

According to foreign-policy experts, that affirmation is flimsy at best. The statement lacked substance, and Trump offered platitudes rather than concrete details differentiating these talks from the failed negotiations under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush while speaking to reporters. Of the four points in the statement, all were included in past agreements with North Korea, and there was no mention of Kim’s human-rights abuses or the “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula. Kim did pledge to destroy a missile site in North Korea, but the scope of the promise and the timeline was unclear. “This is a paper-thin agreement” that “does not commit Kim to real compromises and deadlines,” Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador who served Clinton and both Bush administrations, told me.

“The statement itself is a joke,” Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury, said bluntly. “It is less than any statement that the North Koreans have ever agreed to in the past. On eliminating nuclear weapons, the North Koreans just reaffirmed the statement that they made with the South Koreans,” he told me. “The president continues to say that Kim is giving up his nuclear weapons. Kim continues to refuse to promise that. I don’t know how long they can keep fudging this.”

Kim, meanwhile, won a major concession from Trump—a pledge that the U.S. will end its joint military exercises with South Korea, which Trump subsequently described as “very provocative” and pricey “war games,” adopting the North Korean party line as his own. Responses within the diplomatic community were varied: “Ceasing or reducing our military exercises isn’t a huge deal,” the former State Department staffer said, noting that the U.S. holds military exercises elsewhere in Asia, and that South Korea is usually involved. The problem, this person added, is that “it does give away something right off the top.”

Worse, what Trump promised remains unclear. “That could be a catastrophe,” Lewis said. “With him, he is so careless with language. Does that mean that we are going to scale back some of the largest exercises? O.K., fine. No big deal. That’s great. Those exercises are designed to put pressure on North Korea. We are not putting pressure on North Korea anymore, so we don’t necessarily need those big exercises.” The other possibility would be too absurd to entertain, if Trump hadn’t spent so much time on the campaign trail complaining about footing the bill for allies’ security. (“We need to try to understand what President Trump said,” an anxious-sounding spokesman for South Korean President Moon Jae-in said in a statement after the summit.) “If he actually believes what he is saying, that the alliance is a bad thing and we shouldn’t be in South Korea,” Lewis continued, “then that’s a problem.”

Trump cast the meeting as a mutual victory, calling it “every bit as good for the United States as it was for North Korea.” But whether or not Trump recognizes it, the summit was going to be a win for Kim regardless of what was agreed to. As former top State Department official Lawrence Wilkerson noted, the Kim dynasty has “longed for what a meeting with the United States—and, in particular, a meeting with the U.S. president—would give them in terms of that recognition.” The image of Trump grabbing Kim’s hand, and the president’s declaration that meeting the North Korean dictator—a man who has slaughtered, imprisoned, starved, and tortured millions—was an “honor” is the fulfillment of a Kim-regime dream.

Indeed, the agreement may be a bigger victory for Trump personally than for the United States. “Trump claims a win. Of course he claims a win. And for his supporters, that’s sufficient. If this is the start of a meaningful dialogue that leads to less tension in Korea, he claims credit—and, indeed, deserves some,” a former senior U.S. official told me. “If, as most experts think, giving away elements of our commitment to defend South Korea—ending exercises, perhaps even withdrawing troops—in exchange for the same declaration from the D.P.R.K. about denuclearization that the D.P.R.K. has given before is a failure, Trump will blame others for bad implementation.”

A one-day spectacle, the summit was never expected to deliver a major breakthrough. The question now is whether Trump’s pliant demeanor and decision to vouch for Kim’s trustworthiness lays the groundwork for rapprochement or for the U.S. to be bamboozled. (“I do trust him, yeah,” Trump said in an interview Tuesday following the summit. “Now will I come back to you in a year, and you’ll be interviewing, I’ll say, ‘Gee I made a mistake?’ That’s always possible.”)

According to the joint statement, Pompeo and a North Korean counterpart will lead a new round of negotiations “at the earliest possible date, to implement the outcomes of the U.S.-D.P.R.K. summit.” But as I have previously reported, this process will take months—if not years. “Pompeo will need to begin a long, arduous negotiation,” Burns said. “Do we think Trump has the patience for the twists and turns ahead over a year or two? Will he commit to learn the details? Will he work much harder to bring our allies on board?” And when it comes to sticking to agreements with the U.S., North Korea has a perfect track record of cheating. As one current State Department official told me before the Trump-Kim summit, “If it were another country, or this was the first time, I’d think a lot of people would be applauding, saying those are good confidence-building measures, etc. But again, we’ve been down this road before.”

Pompeo expressed confidence that the Trump administration wouldn’t fall for more chicanery. “The United States has been fooled before—there’s no doubt about it,” he told reporters Monday. “Despite any past flimsy agreements, the president will ensure no potential agreement fails to adequately address the North Korean threat.” But even if it does, the president suggested he will never admit it. “Honestly, I think [Kim’s] going to do these things,” Trump insisted. And if things fall apart? “I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that [I was wrong],” the president shrugged. “I’ll find some kind of excuse.”